President Obama has just come back from his Hawaii vacation, but for rightbloggers it was as if he never went away. They continued to hammer Obama's terrorism policy in his absence, recycling old tropes and coming up with with some fascinating new ones.

When seven members of the CIA were killed in a suicide attack in Afghanistan, Obama called it "a sad occasion in the history of the CIA and our country." You might think that was thoughtful of him, but Erick Erickson of RedState asked, "Could this actually be the greatest and potentially the deadliest of Obama's screw ups so far?"

"I missed the implications of this up front," he admitted, but "...I am hearing from members of the American intelligence community and some on the outside closely connected to those on the inside who are raising a huge red flag right now..."

These authorities tell him "the President's rush to acknowledge the attack on the CIA in Afghanistan and mourn the deaths openly, publicly, and via press release is a huge no no."

One might ask who in Afghanistan doesn't know the CIA is there, and that their agents had been killed -- especially as the CIA had lowered its own flags to half-staff in acknowledgment of their deaths.

But Erickson didn't second-guess his sources. Obama stating the obvious, he said, "gives the terrorists a new recruiting tool -- 'you too can cause America to publicly mourn the loss of their spies.'"

"To you and me this may not seem like a big deal," Erickson added, "But I'm told this is hugely significant ..." Erickson ended, as has become customary for him, with an imputation of treason against the President: "Either this White House is willfully trying to sabotage the intelligence community or they are rank amateurs. I pray to God in Heaven it is the latter."

In his statements on the Christmas crotch-bomber, Obama also mentioned that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had traveled to Yemen, "a country grappling with crushing poverty." TownHall's Kevin McCullough seized on this five-word phrase, and called it Obama's "implication that poor people are the real enemies."

McCullough, who claims to have "personally traveled to likely more impoverished nations than our President has," finds something to admire about the poor, or at least the foreign poor: "They generally are more thankful for what they DO have than anyone living in America. (Especially Obama's welfare defrauding neighbors living on Chicago's South Side.)" Also, a lot of these foreign poor people want to come to America, "far more often than President Obama would ever admit" -- though presumably once they get here they will become the sort of welfare cheats McCullough despises, particularly if they settle in Chicago. Pity these poor souls, who can only have the love of Kevin McCullough if they remain in their foreign hellholes!

This weekend Newsweek had an fascinating report revealing that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and FBI Director Robert Mueller were briefed on "Key Homeland Threats" just days before the Christmas underwear-bomb attempt on a Delta flight.

AJ Strata called the story a "bombshell." "Interesting witness list for Congress," said Strata, "and at least 2 (Holder and Napolitano) are of the far left ilk who have been trying to dismantle what President Bush had put in place for domestic threats..."

Not of the "far left ilk," presumably, is the FBI Director, and one might reasonably ask what he made of the information, and why he shouldn't get some of the flak Obama and Napolitano have been getting for not keeping the Christmas bomber off the plane.

In case his followers were wondering about that, or any of the other less than bombshellesque bits in the story -- which suggest that the relevant government agencies were alerted to potential threats but received incomplete data, rather than ignoring the threats completely, as critics like to charge -- Strata notified readers of "implied misdirection in the the reporting, meant to confuse the average reader," and concluded that "this leaked story is more spin than fact."

So it's part "bombshell," part con job. From Strata's perspective, of course, it's easy to tell which parts to believe. Otherrightbloggers take up the theme ("take it with a grain of salt," "What, no where in the entire report was Yemen mentioned in this leak? That sounds a bit suspicious and convenient doesn't it," etc).

We wonder if any of them saw the other big Newsweek story of the weekend, which reported that "Obama has been keenly focused on the Qaeda threat from Yemen for months," and called the recent Yememi airstrikes that targeted terrorists there part of the President's "covert war" in Yemen, for which "the United States supplied intelligence, missiles, and military support." We'd be interested to know which parts of this they considered spin, and which they considered bombshell.

Some rightbloggers missed the vacationing President so much that they devoted time to studying pictures of him from the White House Flickr account. "No, I don't think Obama's facial expression is just a fluke of when the shutter went off," said Instapundit. "His eyes aren't closed, as some with poor displays seem to think." "The main thing I see when I look at that face," said Ann Althouse, "is: He's tired. Wouldn't it be funny, Barack, if, after all of this, you wake up one morning, and you think: I hate my job?"

"I think I'm seeing it here now with the high-res zoom," said Left Coast Rebel. "I see an inherent elitist-intellectual condescension as I have many times with Obama."

"I already know Obama's a corrupt arrogant prick," said American Power. "What's interesting to me is the possibility that Vice President Biden, hands in pocket, could actually be a cooler corrupt arrogant prick. I'm also reminded of how deeply I miss George W. Bush."

Has he considered scrapbooking? For more Obama photo fun, you may attend rightbloggers' claims that a widely-circulated Photoshop of Obama shining Sarah Palin's shoes has nothing to do with the ancient shoeshine-boy racial slur. And guess who the real racists are? "I think the people who read racism into monkey-like images of Obama, but were okay with similar images of G.W. Bush, are themselves racist," says Little Miss Atilla, "because they think of blacks as unintelligent or something." Clearly some people are better off dealing with pictures than with words.